Simone de Beauvoir — "Woman is not a fixed reality, but a becoming."
Woman is not a fixed reality, but a becoming.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our existence that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."
"I am a feminist, and I am proud of it."
"A woman is not born, but made."
"The body is not a thing, it is a situation: it is our grasp on the world and our sketch of our project."
"To make oneself an object, to make oneself passive, is a very different thing from being a passive object."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.